The Joint Exploratory Society for Interdisciplinary and Cognitive Studies (abbreviated JESICS) is a German-Egyptian research society that is being funded by the DAAD within the German-Arab Research partnerships since January 2015. The mission of JESICS is to maintain an active research and educational society that fosters the advancement in artificial intelligence and cognitive science.

As one of the activities of JESICS, and to further support the initiation and migration of the interest in interdisciplinary studies, JESICS proudly organizes the first interdisciplinary spring school in Cairo, Egypt, during the period 25–30/March/2017.

The school lays the foundational background in interdisciplinary and cognitive studies for interested, young Egyptians who think to pursue interdisciplinary research but lack the guidance or the opportunity so far. During a whole week full of lessons in closely-related interdisciplinary fields, the participants will learn about a plethora of topics closely related to cognitive science & artificial intelligence, delivered by prestigious figures in the respective fields from Egypt, USA, and Germany. The school is rich of interesting topics, international experts, and social activities.

Cognitive Computing:

The focus of the school is on interdisciplinary studies that quintessentially contribute to the cognitive computing paradigm. The delivered lessons generally belong to one or more of fields such as: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Knowledge Representation & Reasoning (KRR), Computational Neuroscience, Machine Learning, Cognitive Modeling, Computer Vision, Computational Linguistics, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), etc.

It goes without saying that the school will not provide an exhaustive overview over each and every subject related to cognitive computing. The intended level of the presented lectures is basic and introductory, with some specific workshop sessions dedicated to demonstrations on the delivered lectures. This kind of mix simply attracts the attention of interested researchers and sheds some light to these fields.

Subjects, Speakers, and the Schedule:

The lectures of 6-cool give a broad overview on many aspects of the following subjects:

The Schedule:

The school opens on the morning of Saturday, the 25th of March, 2017, at 9:00am. After the short opening talks, three more lecture sessions follow on that same day. There are generally four lecture sessions on each of the following weekdays of the school’s week (except on Tuesday, which is reserved for the social activities). To continuously urge interesting discussions and social activities of several kinds, the four sessionson each day interleave with three breaks inbetween (where the middle break from 11:30am to 1:00pm is a coffee break).

The structure of the 6cool weekdays and sessions.

The Director of the DAAD in Egypt, Prof. Roman Luckscheiter, will honor us by giving a short talk on the morning of Wednesday, the 29th of March, 2017. This seems a good opportunity for the audience to ask related questions.

The last day of the school is Thursday, 30-March-2017, where we conclude the school by an open discussion after the lectures, and then hand-on the certificates of attendance and appreciation.

The Social Day: Best of Cairo Tour

There are no classes of 6-cool on Tuesday, 28-March-2017. This is a day fully dedicated to social activities. There is a planned group trip by an air-conditioned bus to visit Cairo’s most interesting places (namely, the Pyramids, the Sphinx, and Saladin’s Citadel in old Cairo).

There are EXACTLY two meeting points: one in front of the main entrance to Ain Shams University’s main campus [meeting 8:30am SHARP!], and another at the hotel (Le Méridien Heliopolis) [meeting 9:00am SHARP!].
We will start the tour to visit the Pyramids of Cheops, Chephren and Mykerinus. Then proceed to visit the Great Sphinx, the tour also includes a visit to the Valley Temple, which belongs to the Pyramids of Chephren.
Afterwards, we will get to visit Cairo Citadel, which was constructed by Salah El Din on the Moqattam hills in 1183 AD to defend Cairo from the armies of Crusaders. We also visit Mohamed Ali Alabaster Mosque, which was designed by the architect Yousif Boushnaq, a Turkish man who came specially from Istanbul and built this great mosque for Mohamed Ali, the ruler of Egypt (1805-1849) who ruled Over 45 years.
We will be accompanied in the trip by professional, certified, English tour guides and Egyptologists.

The trip is followed by a group lunch on one of the floating boats of the River Nile.

[IMPORTANT: Registration to the trip and/or the lunch is made on the first day of the school. As a general rule, not all the attendees will automatically be joining the trip or the lunch (as, obviously, places are limited, and [partial] fees may apply).]

Venue:

The school is held at the Conferences Room, Ain Shams University’s Guest House, Abbasseya, Cairo.

Application Procedure [closed]:

[N.B. Registration is currently CLOSED!]Updates: We are very sorry to inform you that the registration to this event has been closed and is no longer available online. We received an extremely huge number of online applications during the last couple of weeks. People interested in joining the event should directly contact one of the organizers to discuss the possible ways to attend without an official registration.

Participation is free of charge for the interested Egyptian undergraduate students in their last year of college as well as the Egyptian researchers in their first years of postgraduate studies (from all related field).

Interested young Egyptians may apply by filling in the form at the following URL https://form.myjotform.com/70104680334548, or by sending an application message to Dr. Ahmed M. H. Abdel-Fattah at jesics@sci.asu.edu.eg, with a statement (2–3 paragraphs) that outlines their personal information, research interests, and reasons for considering their participation as beneficial. The application message must include the contact information of a reference professor who will be contacted to recommend and confirm the participation of the applicant. [N.B. We hope that potential applicants appreciate that both our efforts to organize the school as well as their participation decisions are serious issues. A considerable amount of effort, people, money, hours of preparations, contacts, etc., have been –and will be– devoted to delivering the school and making it available for free. An applicant’s mere intention of participation is not enough; they need to prove that they took an educated, serious decision, which they intend to commit to and not waste any resources invested by others.]

If an applicant prefers to send an email to jesics@sci.asu.edu.eg (instead of filling in the online application form at https://form.myjotform.com/70104680334548), they are requested to kindly make sure that the title of their email reads: “Participation Request in 6COOL”.

Acknowledgements

We’d like to express our gratitude and thanks to everyone who helped and supported the event. People in the following non-exhaustive list particularly contributed a lot. Others thankfully helped in making the event achievable, either by presentation, preparation, fund, or support in other ways: